What is Overture?

[Nintwa]

Overture?

I am new here and I don't quite understand this overture thing, what is it and how do you find it out?

Sorry if this is in the wrong section but I found that this was the place that it wsas most used.

 

[hyperlackofspace]

To be honest...I kinda wondering the same thing. I've been to their website..but it didn't help much.

 

[RajanUrs]

Overture Services, Inc. is the global leader in commercial search, offering new and more powerful ways for businesses and customers to connect on the Internet and beyond. Through its core Pay-For-Performance product, the company operates a real-time marketplace where its base of 80,000 advertisers can bid for placement in search results that Overture distributes to affiliate partners such as MSN, Yahoo!, CNN.com and InfoSpace.

Overture's unique business model offers major benefits to advertisers and affiliate partners. It enables advertisers to target millions of customers searching for products and services online; gives them control over their placement in search results; and enables them to pay the precise amount at which they value each lead. Moreover, Overture provides affiliate partners with a high quality, revenue-generating search capability, while ensuring their individual users receive targeted, relevant listings that deliver on their expressed and anticipated needs.

tutorials here for more: http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ays/pl.jhtml

 

[RJ]

A lot of times you here people talking about Overture, they are really talking about Overture's search term suggestion tool.

This is an online tool that lets you know how many times a term was searched last month. Domain buyers use it as a tool to see what kind of demand might exist for certain terms.

For interest you're considering buying the domain "doggrooming.com". You can go to the suggestion tool and see if anyone searches for the term "Dog Grooming". In this case, you can see it was, where the term "Dog Shampooing" was not searched for at all. In theory, the domain "DogGrooming.Com" would be much more valuable than "DogShampooing.Com"

The suggstion tool is located at

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

(Bookmark it and use it a lot!)

You can stop reading here unless you want to become a "pro" at using the Overture Suggestion tool.

For more advanced use of the suggestion tool, to estimate "type-ins" :


You can also use the suggestion tool to guestimate how many "type-ins" a domain gets. A "type-in" occurs when someone types in a domain name into their browser window, usually from memory or just checking to see what is at that domain.

There's no way to actually know how many type-ins a domain gets, unless you own the domain and have traffic stats. The suggestion tool is used because there is often a relation to how many times people mistakenly typein your domain into a search engine and how many people "type-in" your domain name.

Using the example from before, we use the suggestion tool to search for "doggrooming.com". We see that there is 106 searches done last month for that domain name.

In my experience (and others will have their own opinions), these numbers generally indicate from 50% less to 50% more the number in daily type-ins to the domain name.

So for our example, 106 overture results would indicate type-ins of 53 to 159 per day.

A word of warning: common sense must be used. People only type in domains of common generic terms or sites they are familiar with. Overture searches are easily manipulated by search scripts and anyone who wants to inflate the numbers on a domain.

If you find a domain that is getting overture numbers for the domain itself, but none for the search term, it's likely the numbers are artificially inflated for this month.

This happens a lot when domains are nearing their expiration date. Many domain speculators that use scripts to check for expiring domains with link popularity end up artifially inflating the overture numbers for the domain. So do your research and try to guess why the domain would have type-ins and don't rely on Overture only.

Congrats if you read all this. You know more than most domain buyers now.

 

[Jeff]

GREAT post, RJ!!
I'd send you some NP$ if you weren't already the head honcho.

 

[WhiteLion]

Yeah cheers RJ!

 

[doubledee999]

Good post RJ